Ever heard of it before? Me neither but it’s a bare-bones/no frills airline that flies to Europe for about 1/3 of the price of other airlines. Basically for the price you pay you get one personal item (you read that right, PERSONAL ITEM–not even a carry-on) and transportation from Chicago to Paris. Nothing is included and you pay for anything extra you want. Also the layover is in Iceland. Since we are packing in backpacks, we don’t have a lot of luggage (even still I did buy a carry-on for my mom and me). Luckily, we don’t need strollers or any other equipment.

Wow was in the news this week. The parent company of Frontier Airlines recently invested in Wow to try and “revive the struggling airline”. What does this mean for us? Well hopefully this means that Wow will still be in operation come May but if not, we have travel insurance. It will be quite a scramble to reschedule flights if this does happen but I don’t foresee that given it’s a new investment. My guess is that it will positively affect our experience given that the investors want to improve the customer experience to try and boost the company back up.

My mom is coming with us and spending the first two weeks with us. Then she will fly back using Delta Skymiles I accrued with travel hacking (thanks Melissa!). Basically, you take out a credit card with a sign-on bonus (in Delta’s case it was about 60,000 miles for spending $3,000 in the first 3 months). Then you pay your bill on time. You can repeat this on other cards. Our Wow flights I put on a Capital One card we had with points that pay for travel so originally it was $1600 total for all 6 of us to fly one way but using the travel points, we only paid $1000. So about $166/person to fly to France one way.

I haven’t booked our flights back yet but we have 4 free flights on United we got through travel hacking. If you want to try it yourself google “travel miles 101”. They have a free tutorial that you can read (via email) that walks you through the process and recommends cards to start with.